We're currently in the process of testing some changes to these traits internally.

The changes (which are still in test, and may change again at a later time) are as follows:

-Renamed the Covert Operative traits to Romulan Operative to avoid it being confused with the "Covert" trait.

-The Basic Romulan Operative, Romulan Operative, and Superior Romulan Operative traits now can stack with themselves if the player has multiple Bridge Officers with the same trait. For example, having two officers with Romulan Operative will now provide the combined bonuses from both officers.

We realize that having Bridge Officers with traits that passively contribute a significant amount to the ship's performance is unusual. (Traits like Teamwork and Efficient also help, but not in a way that's quite as visible as Critical Hit chance.) We're interested in re-tuning some older traits - and introducing new ones - to provide interesting options for this type of thing for each type of ship and captain specialization, but I can't provide an ETA on that at this time.

On a somewhat related note, we also know that some players are concerned about power creep. We're walking a careful line to allow for meaningful advancement within our new systems (such as the Fleet and Reputation systems) without completely invalidating the hard work players have done in earlier game systems (such as the old STF rewards).

We're not always going to be able to make everyone happy - some people will always want endgame character power to remain static, whereas some other players prefer to always have more options for vertical progression as we implement more content and systems. We will continue to strive to improve our game, but please understand that most changes in a MMO will disappoint of frustrate one group or another.